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We see roundworms with decentralized nervous systems show chemical traces of fear, so it is actually hardwired deep in organisms and has been there a very, very long time. Fear is just too useful as a survival mechanism.

Speaking of ants having a survival instinct, ant death spirals are a thing. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill

How? Did limbic system evolve as "fear of death" or "peer recognition and perception of shared fate" system?

(Not doubting the chicken nuggets, just wondering about the lower/simpler end of the scale.)

Doesn’t mean we have to eat people or murdering animals. A rare person beats himself up for eating salad, but I promise you majority of people around you have various reservations about murdering and hurting animals and people. Growing up in some cultures and being fed abstract clean pieces of flesh just allows people to compartmentalize.

You cannot do no harm, you can still do less harm. I suspect you agree with this, but I wonder if you would phrase it this way

Source? It’s very possible today to adopt a plant-based diet and its typically superior in its health benefits to most other diets (especially the standard Western diet). https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/planning-a-plant-b...

Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time

Ordinarily in Minecraft if you click a cow with a bucket it fills with milk, a simplistic model of how this works that reflects probably the level of thought most people have about where cow milk comes from.

One of the mods (Animalia maybe?) obliges you to do this properly. Find a male and a female, enclose them and make sure they're well fed so that they'll breed, wait a while for the female to give birth, steal the calf, and then you can collect her milk. I would bet far more players in games with that mod go vegan because it was a lot of hassle to make these arrangements compared to making soy milk.

Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.

I once heard someone claim that we've somehow completely "bred away" any maternal instincts from dairy cows. So it's perfectly okay to forcibly separate them from their calves.

It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.

I’m hoping that at some point we’d be able to have free range cows that are only hormonally forced to make milk. And no calves need to be born (or killed).

> We are different from other animals

Most animals are different from most others, we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special.

Other animals use fire, while we continue to seem unique in creating it. Fire hawks take burning sticks and alight brush to flush prey.

https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...

Humans had completely mastered fire by about 200,000 years ago - after 800,000 years of experimentation.

Speech is dated to around 60,000 years ago, though some say we started down that path 200,000 years ago: right when we mastered fire.

So by your logic we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals?

> We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.

That probably is the better prior for muggles these days, yeah.

Of course, scientifically speaking, you still shouldn't anthropomorphize upfront, or you might actually miss a lot! Different creatures aren't entirely exactly the same as us. They can <see> and <do> things we can't , and vice versa. So even just from that their lived reality will diverge from ours, and that's where all the interesting science is hiding.

That said, while you shouldn't necessarily anthropomorphize upfront; if there's later proven to be a behavioral overlap, then proven is proven, and you don't get to reject it afterwards. (People often get this one wrong.)

> Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.

My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.

I can barely read Jill Lawson's letter:

  My son, Jeffrey, was a very tiny, very sick premature baby, born Feb. 9, 1985, at a gestational age of 25-26 weeks. During the almost two months of his life, he was on a respirator, with several lung diseases, a heart problem, kidney problems, and a brain bleed.

  ... Jeffrey had holes cut on both sides of his neck, another hole cut in his right chest, an incision from his breastbone around to his backbone, his ribs pried apart, and an extra artery near his heart tied off. This was topped off with another hole cut in his left side for a chest tube. The operation lasted 12 hours. Jeffrey was awake through it all.

  The anesthesiologist paralyzed him with Pavulon, a curare drug that left him unable to move, but totally conscious. When I questioned the anesthesiologist ... she said Jeffrey was too sick to tolerate powerful anesthetics. Anyway, she said, it had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain. She seemed sincerely puzzled as to why I was concerned. It turns out that such care, or lack thereof, is possible because, as a neonatologist explained, babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock no matter how much agony they suffer.

> do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?

When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.

And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.

Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.

There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley

The show Pluribus explores this idea. I can't wait for more episodes

You can give them emotional signals, but I feel like it's cruel to do so and would recommend against it.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Insofar as grieving is an inherently, fundamentally a very particular chemical process, the answer is a resounding “no”.

do humans? or is it only because we're the ones doing the research and so we say we do?

i think most people are automatons and can be programmed.

it is the most moral thing to program people to operate in ways that causes least harm to everyone else around them that has to live with them.

people like certain foods, outrage, and gambling/fomo.

Nope.

They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.

We are not different. Whales exhibit culture too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture

https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/rduhmx/does_any_...

Ahh I appreciate that but I’ve not experienced it personally though I know friends who have.

The key word is possibly. Any statement with possibly in it could be true or false, it is speculation.

But they need to explain why the range is so large. Did they witness whales at the site on day 2? It's unnecessarily ambiguous.

I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.

What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.

And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.

The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.

Research requires pedantry.